Francis Godolphin’s mother, Margaret Godolphin (née Blagge), died only six days after she gave birth to him in September 1678, and he was educated in his early years by her close ‘spiritual friend’ John Evelyn, before he went to Eton and eventually Cambridge.
The growing friendship and alliance between Lord Godolphin and John Churchill, earl (later duke) of Marlborough, and his wife, Sarah, was cemented by Francis’s marriage in April 1698 to Marlborough’s eldest daughter, Lady Henrietta (‘Harriet’). Anne, then princess royal, offered to pay all of the substantial dowry of £10,000 on behalf of her ‘dear Mrs Freeman’ (i.e. the countess of Marlborough), but the countess eventually only accepted half of that amount from her mistress.
Godolphin’s trajectory at court and in Parliament in the reign of Anne roughly followed that of his father, appointed lord treasurer by the new queen, and of his father-in-law, captain-general of the Allied forces. At the accession Godolphin and his wife were attached to the royal household, Lady Harriet joining her mother, the duchess of Marlborough, as a lady of the bedchamber to the queen, while Francis Godolphin was made a gentleman of the bedchamber to her consort, Prince George, of Denmark. In 1704 Godolphin’s father and the duchess of Marlborough secured for him the lucrative post of cofferer of the household, a place worth £2,000 p.a., prompting his resignation as teller of the exchequer in that year, and in early 1705 he was made warden of the Stannaries, high steward of the duchy of Cornwall and master forester of Dartmoor.
In 1702 and again in 1705 Godolphin was returned for Helston and from 26 Dec. 1705, when his father was raised in the peerage to become earl of Godolphin, Francis was styled Viscount Rialton. In February 1707 Marlborough, recently granted the manor of Woodstock in Oxfordshire, presented Rialton as his candidate for one of the county seats in the upcoming election of 1708, but Charles Talbot, duke of Shrewsbury, predicted accurately that Rialton ‘will meet with a greater opposition than I could have imagined an heir of the duke of Marlborough recommended by him could have found’.
Following the pattern of his father and father-in-law, over these years Rialton gradually aligned himself more closely with the Whigs willing to support the war policy of the duumvirs and he suffered from their reversal of political fortune in 1710. After his father’s removal from the treasurership in August 1710, he had great difficulty retaining a seat in the Commons, but was eventually returned for the Cornish borough of Tregony on the Boscawen interest. On 13 May 1711 he lost his principal court post, when he was removed as cofferer of the household, a move which convinced Frances Needham, writing to the duchess of Marlborough, that ‘sure never anything was like the violence they [the new ministry], go on with, like a rapid stream that you can’t stop the course of’.
Rialton succeeded to his father’s earldom on 15 Sept. 1712. The only honours that accompanied his rise in the peerage were slight ones – the recordership of the borough of Helston, a hereditary office vested in his family, and the deputy rangership of Windsor House Park, an office under his mother-in-law, the duchess of Marlborough, the warden of the Park.
Godolphin came to the first day of the session of spring 1713 but only attended 44 per cent of its sitting days. Oxford saw him as an opponent of both his ministry and the peace, and forecast that he would oppose the French commercial treaty – which was defeated in the Commons before it even came before the House. He appears to have had little discernible role in either Oxfordshire or Cornwall during the elections of late summer 1713, and even the Godolphin family’s control of Helston came under threat as George Granville, recently created Baron Lansdown, was able to return two Tories for the borough. Godolphin came to only slightly more (47 per cent) of the sittings of the new Parliament’s first session, starting in February 1714. His pattern of proxy giving and receiving during this session suggests that, despite his low attendance, he was eager to maintain Whig votes in the House. His proxy partners in the session of April–July 1713 cannot be known, owing to the loss of the proxy registers for that period, but it is likely that he was as active a member of a network of proxy exchanges with fellow Whigs then as he was in the following 1714 session. He registered his proxy with his brother-in-law, Charles Spencer, 3rd earl of Sunderland, from 6 Feb. to 4 Mar. 1714; with Charles Townshend, 2nd Viscount Townshend, from 16 Mar. to 27 Apr.; and with Edward Russell, earl of Orford, from 11 to 23 June. Daniel Finch, 2nd earl of Nottingham, forecast in late May that Godolphin would vote against the Schism bill and it may have been to shore up votes against this bill that Godolphin entrusted his vote to Orford just five days before the division.
In the last days of this session he was called on to hold the proxy of other Whigs in turn. He held the proxy of Charles Fitzroy, 2nd duke of Grafton, for only two days (28–29 June 1714) and of Richard Newport, 2nd earl of Bradford, for another two days (6–7 July). In the final five days of the session, which ended on 9 July, he also held the proxy of Sunderland on two occasions, for a matter of a day or two, as Sunderland flitted in and out of the House. Godolphin only attended the first day of the following session, 1 Aug. 1714, following the queen’s death, and on 2 Aug. registered his proxy with Grafton for the remainder of the session.
As a representative of a family which had supported the war with France and the Hanoverian Succession, Godolphin was rewarded by the new king. He was reinstated as cofferer of the household in October 1714, appointed lord lieutenant of Oxfordshire in 1715 and, after his wife became suo jure duchess of Marlborough upon her father’s death on 16 June 1722, was sworn to the privy council and made groom of the stole in 1723. He was probably even busier on the domestic front, for within the space of a few weeks in 1722 he became an executor for the estates of both his brother-in-law, Sunderland, and his father-in-law, Marlborough, and much of the remainder of his life was spent communicating with and trying to pacify his mother-in-law, the imperious dowager duchess of Marlborough.
Godolphin’s career in the Hanoverian House of Lords in the early years of George I and beyond will be discussed in greater depth in the next phase of this work. His attitude to the House, however, may be best expressed by his response to the request from his mother-in-law to speak for her interest in her appeal of 1721 against the exchequer judgment that she and the duke were personally responsible for the debts incurred in building Blenheim Palace. He explained to her ‘that to have ten times the value of the debt he could not speak, that he had once attempted it in the House of Commons in a mighty trivial thing and was quite out’.
In 1735 Godolphin, battered by the deaths in the space of a few years of his only son and heir, William Godolphin‡, styled marquess of Blandford, and of his wife, gave up his posts in the bedchamber and in Windsor House Park. He was, however, promoted to be lord privy seal instead. He resigned from this post in April 1740, having already stepped down as lord lieutenant of Oxfordshire the previous year. At his death on 17 Jan. 1766 there were no direct male heirs to the earldom, but in 1735 Godolphin had secured a patent as Baron Godolphin of Helston, with a special remainder to the descendants of his uncle Henry Godolphin. By this his cousin and namesake, Francis Godolphin* [1737], succeeded as 2nd Baron Godolphin of Helston. Godolphin’s will made the 2nd baron the principal heir of his Cornish lands and his sole executor, but also laid out a daunting profusion of gifts to a large circle of servants, family members and friends. To his one surviving child, Henrietta, duchess of Newcastle, already married to probably the richest peer in the kingdom, he was able to leave Bank of England stock worth £14,000.